On Tue, Aug 16, 2005 at 11:05:33AM -0700, darin strait wrote:
> Background:
> I have an Ultra10. It does very light duty as my personal subversion
> server and as a print server for the apartment. I would like to add
> Questions:
> Unless I'm mistaken, my Ultra10 will only hold 2 drives in addition to
> the CDROM. Is that right?
>
> My understanding that the on-board IDE will only support 128GB drives.
> Is that true?
Also, and perhaps more importantly, it is only DMA33 max. I won't even
swear that it does DMA. But it whether it's PIO or DMA, it's only
33MHz, which is darn slow these days. The machine itself is capable of
handling drives that are much faster.
The problem AFAICT is that add in ATA cards these days all seem to have
and X86 bios on them. I myself would like to know if anyone knows an
SATA or PATA controller card that doesn't need to execute its X86 bios
to be visible on the PCI bus.
I've used a SCSI controller, it seems to be easy to buy one w/o a bios
on it. But there goes your cost savings.
160GB SATA - ~$70US
147GB SCSI - ~$225
300GB SATA - ~$140US
300GB SCSI - ~$555US
A USB2 card and an external drive might be your best choice. Sure it's
only probably capable of 30MB/sec or so, but I'm not sure the U10 is
really up to pumping out much more than that.
a